Aaron Copland in Latin America: Music and Cultural Politics by Carol A. Hess (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Aaron Copland in Latin America: Music and Cultural Politics by Carol A. Hess Howard Pollack Aaron Copland in Latin America: Music and Cultural Politics. By Carol A. Hess. (Music in American Life.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2023. [344 p. ISBN 978-0-252-04485-4 (hardback). $125; ISBN 978-0-252-05400-6 (e-book). $14.95] In addition to all his other notable accomplishments as composer, pianist, conductor, writer, and concert organiser, Aaron Copland’s work as a cultural ambassador—both officially and unofficially—rates among his most significant and impressive achievements. Over the years, he travelled far and wide, championing American music abroad, and conversely introducing foreign contemporary music to Americans back home. As head of the faculty at the Berkshire Music Center for twenty-five years, he made Tanglewood a hub for such activities by inviting distinguished foreign composers to teach there, and by arranging for students from around the world to study there as well. Even before such activities began to take shape in the 1930s, Copland (1900–1990) had done likewise on the domestic front, promoting his colleagues at home to the point that even as a young man he became known as ‘the dean of American music’. He recognised that the cause of new music—his own and others—could be greatly enriched, both artistically and pragmatically, by communal solidarity and interaction; and in addition to the quality of his music and musicianship, he had the energy, idealism, intelligence, congeniality, eloquence, tact, and connections to make him a natural and effective leader in this respect. Being a bachelor without steady employment facilitated a certain freedom of time and movement as well. Whereas his efforts on behalf of his com-patriots—as reflected in his association with the League of Composers, Copland-Sessions Concerts, Yaddo Festival, Cos Cob Press, New School for Social Research, Tanglewood, and so forth—are relatively well known, his extensive engagement with Latin-American music has gone less studied and appreciated. This latter involvement, which dated back to the 1920s, and his close friendship with the Mexican composer Carlos Chávez, drew in large part on the conviction that American and Latin American composers were bound by history, culture, and destiny, including what Copland saw as the need to strike new paths from those laid down by European hegemony (as much as he held the great European tradition in high esteem). Having written books on Manuel de Falla (2004), Pan Americanism (2013), and Latin American music (2018), Carol A. Hess, Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, Davis, is in an excellent position to give this topic some much-needed attention. In this new book, she focusses on Cop-land’s four U.S. government-sponsored tours in 1941, 1947, 1962, and 1963. Sponsored by the Office of Inter-American Affairs, the five-month 1941 trip took him to nine countries: Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Cuba. As part of a Visiting [End Page 271] Professor Program, he returned to South America in 1947, spending three months in Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. Travelling again to Latin America as a government agent, this time courtesy of the American Specialists Program, Copland divided his assignment into two segments, travelling to Mexico, Brazil, and Uruguay in 1962, and Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and once again Brazil in 1963. As part of these government-sponsored travels, Copland lectured about American music in person, on the radio, and eventually on television; conducted American music with orchestras and performed some of his piano works as well; met with dozens of composers and examined their music; arranged for Latin-American musicians to study and perform in the U.S.; and in turn, recommended American artists for subsidised travel abroad. Hess’s well-researched survey reports on many of these activities, drawing especially on the journals Copland kept during his sojourns and on newspaper accounts of his lectures and concerts. Although sensitive to contradictions and limitations inherent in such undertakings, Hess deems Copland’s efforts on balance enormously successful, thanks not only to those personal traits mentioned above, but to his fluency in Spanish and elementary knowledge of Portuguese as well...